he
planned a little dissipation, and took his two maiden aunts to Paris,
where they enjoyed a dazzling round of museums and picture galleries,
and came back feeling that they had indeed seen life. He never told his
aunts or any one else about the marriage on the island--because no
one likes it to be generally known if he has had insane fits, however
interesting and unusual.

CHAPTER 10. THE HOLE IN THE CARPET

Hooray! hooray! hooray!
Mother comes home to-day;
Mother comes home to-day,
Hooray! hooray! hooray!'

Jane sang this simple song directly after breakfast, and the Phoenix
shed crystal tears of affectionate sympathy.

'How beautiful,' it said, 'is filial devotion!'

'She won't be home till past bedtime, though,' said Robert. 'We might
have one more carpet-day.'

He was glad that mother was coming home--quite glad, very glad; but at
the same time that gladness was rudely contradicted by a quite strong
feeling of sorrow, because now they could not go out all day on the
carpet.

'I do wish we could go and get something nice for mother, only she'd
want to know where we got it,' said Anthea. 'And she'd never, never
believe it, the truth. People never do, somehow, if it's at all
interesting.'

'I'll tell you what,' said Robert. 'Suppose we wished the carpet to take
us somewhere where we could find a purse with money in it--then we could
buy her something.'

'Suppose it took us somewhere foreign, and the purse was covered with
strange Eastern devices, embroidered in rich silks, and full of money
that wasn't money at all here, only foreign curiosities, then we
couldn't spend it, and people would bother about where we got it, and we
shouldn't know how on earth to get out of it at all.'

Cyril moved the table off the carpet as he spoke, and its leg caught
in one of Anthea's darns and ripped away most of it, as well as a large
slit in the carpet.

'Well, now you HAVE done it,' said Robert.

But Anthea was a really first-class sister. She did not say a word
till she had got out the Scotch heather-mixture fingering wool and the
darning-needle and the thimble and the scissors, and by that time she
had been able to get the better of her natural wish to be thoroughly
disagreeable, and was able to say quite kindly--

'Never mind, Squirrel, I'll soon mend it.'

Cyril thumped her on the back. He understood exactly how she had felt,
and he was not an ungrateful brother.

'Respecting the